Totally agree with your comment, however I was thinking more of the streaming television that several of the providers are offering now. If I had to record, encode, and transfer everything in prep every morning for sure I'd get bored of that situation very, very quickly. Indeed, even keeping AvantGo content updated on my PDA seemed like more hassle than it was worth.
I suspect they're in trouble because they're not performing a valuable enough service.
Is it really a funding problems? Sounds more like a lame technical screw up soap opera.
Why is this on Slashdot? Some random site has some problems, and that gets a Slashdot front-page story? The fact that they have "open source" in their name doesn't quite merit it. And I love the popup-prevention-circumvention popups at the forum link included in the submission. Nice.
It's not that it's not here yet, but that it's been here and gone. You have to have a little mind to spend it watching a little 5cm screen, and watch what.
It is of limited use, and the advertisements pushing it border on the absurd (as they always do - it's going to replace your home theater system!), however there most certainly is a place for it: A year back I commuted into the city, spending an hour each way on a commuter train (like millions across the continent - in this case North America). I would love to have been able to make use of that time somehow: Reading was too visually difficult, and there wasn't realistically space to use a laptop, or even really to read a newspaper.
China should be praised for taking this action, not bashed.
I wasn't bashing. In fact I'm a great fan of China, and anticipate great progress over the coming decades, but the propaganda-ish white-washed "China-the-great-leader" nonsense deserves to be called wherever it is seen. The Soviet Union proclaimed lots of great initiatives (the benefit of incredible statism) that on paper sounded great (earning them a lot of admirers), but in reality they were economic and ecological nightmares, built on the backs of a lot of oppressed people.
Regarding slavery - it is remarkable that everyone is looking for "a guy in chains" type scenarios. When the government has absolute control over the population, and dictates exactly what and where and how they'll do things, and the benefit is largely for someone else, that's slavery. You don't need to a white cotton farm owner to have slavery - Communist China practiced it on a very large scale.
Errr, no I didn't. In fact I don't believe I mentioned America once, or made reference to it apart from as a part of the whole called "The West". In fact, I'm Canadian.
Sounds like you have an incredibly simplistic and polarized way of seeing the world, where only extreme contrasts and competing factions can exist. How sad.
Was there supposed to be something profound about that, because if there was then you were terribly off the mark. Sometimes the ol' transposition technique works, but here it was just lame.
Please elaborate on these slaves. I know of no huge slave populations in China's history.
When state controls tell you exist what you can do where, to the point that it has absolute control over your life, you're a slave. You exist to serve the communist party.
Also, China's wealth is not simple "slingshotting."
The point was simply that China isn't simply going through what other countries went through earlier now - China has advantages, economic and technological, that obviously the "West" didn't have as it developed. Saying "OMG! China is doing it so much better than England did in the 1800s" just sounds rather...ridiculous.
And China is not "of course" cleaning up. China is pioneering. China is looking forwards 50 years. That is what has kept China chugging and not collapsing.
Um, no - China is "of course" cleaning up. It's basically in the cards for every progressing economy - it reaches a stage and then suddenly environmental concerns come to the forefront. When you have huge centrist control and a docile population, you also have the ability to "pioneer" by pushing people around to do whatever you want. Oooh, win win.
I mean seriously, It really would be. I say this in a good way.
Unfortunately planned cities tend to go terribly wrong. Brasilia is a good example of a planned city, and while it eventually became a credible city, it is in spite of the original planning, not because of it.
Re:We can all breathe a bit easier
on
Chinese Eco-Cities
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
China is trying to industrialize and modernize without the same harships and human suffering.
Yeah, China is a real beacon of freedom and fairness. Oh, no, wait - China actually has a long, brutal history of tyranny and oppression, with a history of more "slaves" than the West ever had in its worst moments. Moralizing about that is, quite simply, remarkable.
China's current economic wealth is of course slingshotting on the backs of the West - it hardly occurring in a vacuum.
India is much worse, and per capita Canada is one of the worst with America coming in second.
Canada 1/40th the number of people over more land than China - saying we're "worse" is lame given that the "per capita" consumption is largely the creation of resource wealth for the world.
Of course China is cleaning up, as all economies do when they become more wealthy - suddenly living in a shithole doesn't seem as appealing, and you start to want to have clean air and clean cities. Just look at the industrialization of London, England as a great example of this.
Since filing a patent is evil, Google has violated its "do no evil" policy.
Queue someone claiming that it's a defensive patent, and Google is just using the system to defend themselves. Of course that sort of claim is pure nonsense.
Anyways, it's hardly new - Google has been using the patent system since they first hit the scene with PageRank.
HDTV adoption is slow at best, and consumers aren't going to move to a better format than that for many many decades.
One of the benefits of HDTV, as commonly deployed, is that it decouples the display from the source - e.g. you can watch an 1080i signal on a 480i SDTV screen, a 720p, or a 1080i, or hypothetically anything larger. My LCD TV accepts a DVI input feeding from 480i to 1080i, and it displays it on the 720p screen.
This decoupling is a major benefit, because if one of the satellite providers wanted to support this new hyper-format, they'd likely have a traditional DVI output, along with a new Super-DVI or whatever output.
The huge schism that happened between NTSC and HDTV never needs to happen again, and there is no reason why we can't continually scale up. LCD prices are dropping, and it seems entirely reasonable that large grids of high resolution displays will become economical within a decade.
Thats all well and good but what kind of display can handle that resolution?
A super matrix of LCD panels. Really with the continuing advances in LCD quality and yields, they're going to continue to get cheaper and cheaper, and there will come a time not too long from now when you can do a Farenheit 451 and have a room with walls that are giant televisions.
Of course I'm still wondering how a 8K x 4K camera (32MP) comes out at "8MP". A quality 32MP camera is still years off.
If you havent noticed/. is pretty much under seige by Microsofties and astroturfers. Not many dislike google since they have done nothing wrong yet. Except ofcourse your average MS fanboy who hates everything that MS hates.
Are you kidding? This place is overflowing with Google juice, with endless ranks of Google fanboys falling over themselves to praise whatever it is that Google has done lately to push ads more intrusively into our lives. I find it remarkable that an argument that "all Google wants is to feed you ads" can be stated with a straight face. Isn't this the crowd that demonized Doubleclick to the ends of the Earth? So what makes Google so different from Doubleclick? Oh, right - they use Linux so they must be good.
So keep on believing that whoever isn't drinking the Google coolaid is secretly a Microsoft astroturfer.
But the fact that a company's actions may be motivated by profit does not mean they aren't commendable.
Commendable might be a bit strong of a word. Agreeable perhaps, but not commendable.
For instance in the era of Rosa Parks, most private bus companies fervently disagreed with segregation rules. Champions for the oppressed? No. Most of the owners were terrible racists, but they saw profits hurt by the law. It doesn't make their opposition commendable, it makes it coincidentally parallel with real good.
? The parent poster was giving those two options as alternatives, not as a combination. e.g. if you can't use xmlhttprequest, then you use a hidden iframe to do the background transfers.
With most of the tasks that I've found a use for "AJAX" I've never used XML. Rather, we should just be referring to the general sense of using either XMLHttpRequest/Iframes as "Ajax" to keep things simple for consumers.
Windows Live is a painfully bad rip off of Google's Personal Homepage [google.com].
I hope you're kidding. It seems, more and more, that there are the deluded who believe that Google, along with Apple, are responsible for everything.
This is nothing more than a rehash of portals, such that we saw in the late 90s. Excite was one of the biggest and most configurable portals, and of course many of us configured it, setting up our stocks and our weather, and then never used it again.
Developers are leaving Microsoft and going to Google in hopes to make millions like early Microsoft employees did.
It's a bit late for that at Google now: It's too big of a company for that get-rich-quick type nonsense. However it is true that a lot of ex-Microsofters have left to join small startups, or to create one themselves. This is especially true too now that Microsoft is becoming just like every other traditional "where careers go to die" organization.
Also Microsoft is stuck using their own software as a development platform
Nonsense. Microsoft's development platform is extraordinarily powerful, and it certainly isn't a detriment that they use it.
The problem that Microsoft's internet ventures have, and it's always been this way, is that they do the absolute minimum amount possible to ensure that they aren't eviscerated, but no more. If you remember, the IE team smoked Netscape, and then they were promptly disbanded. Why? Because that team and group represented a threat to the Microsoft cash cows - Office and Windows. These "web versions" of Office and Windows are almost laughable - if anything they'll complement, and most certainly they won't replace until Microsoft is on its deathbed and the revenue has completely dried up.
But if it were me, and if I play CIO for a moment, I'd make DANG sure I get it right before converting millions of documents.
Remember that Microsoft has made OfficeXML the default file format in the upcoming Office 12, so some sort of shift seems inevitable. That sort of transition was probably taken as an opportunity to consider alternatives, which is how OpenDocument got its big break.
I'd work more towards.pdf in the near-term and see how these openDoc formats shake out.
PDFs are one of their file formats (in fact it led Microsoft to support PDFs natively in Office), however it's more of an output format rather than a working format.
This line kills me: "OpenDocument file format standard might be influenced by Microsoft." Why?
It's currently reading as - "suggested that groups that oppose the OpenDocument file format standard might be influenced by Microsoft."
Of course the meaning is that some believe that the big backlash recently (with every "grassroots" group announcing their beefs with the move to OpenDocument) is the result of Microsoft lobbying, which isn't an inconceivable idea.
You are wrong to tell us "if you don't like it don't play the game." Blizzard deserves all the bad press it can be given. They're not going to get bad press if everyone just silently submits
If you vote with your dollars then Blizzard will get much worse than bad press - they'll be financially punished. Of course most of the complainers don't want to stop playing, they just want to have thei cake and eat it too.
I've played several games that utilize the highly invasive punkbuster software, and as long as the operations are internal and it isn't sending my data up to headquarters, I don't care what it's doing. The net result is that the online games I play tend to have a vastly higher quality than in days of old, so I'm entirely willing to "Give up the right", as lame as that is.
I still don't get the uproar over the scanning, because it's not like the entire book is made available for free. The search is so crippled that it makes me think the people who are upset have never used it before.
The uproar is because Google is making a giant internal database of copyrighted material - a database that, in some scenarios, could easily be copied (either by an employee, a hacker, whatever). Publishers don't want that sort of central risk, especially when they aren't being brought in as partners (let's face it - Google exists on the backs of everyone else's content)
Slashdot Mirror
Totally agree with your comment, however I was thinking more of the streaming television that several of the providers are offering now. If I had to record, encode, and transfer everything in prep every morning for sure I'd get bored of that situation very, very quickly. Indeed, even keeping AvantGo content updated on my PDA seemed like more hassle than it was worth.
I suspect they're in trouble because they're not performing a valuable enough service.
Is it really a funding problems? Sounds more like a lame technical screw up soap opera.
Why is this on Slashdot? Some random site has some problems, and that gets a Slashdot front-page story? The fact that they have "open source" in their name doesn't quite merit it. And I love the popup-prevention-circumvention popups at the forum link included in the submission. Nice.
It's not that it's not here yet, but that it's been here and gone. You have to have a little mind to spend it watching a little 5cm screen, and watch what.
It is of limited use, and the advertisements pushing it border on the absurd (as they always do - it's going to replace your home theater system!), however there most certainly is a place for it: A year back I commuted into the city, spending an hour each way on a commuter train (like millions across the continent - in this case North America). I would love to have been able to make use of that time somehow: Reading was too visually difficult, and there wasn't realistically space to use a laptop, or even really to read a newspaper.
China should be praised for taking this action, not bashed.
I wasn't bashing. In fact I'm a great fan of China, and anticipate great progress over the coming decades, but the propaganda-ish white-washed "China-the-great-leader" nonsense deserves to be called wherever it is seen. The Soviet Union proclaimed lots of great initiatives (the benefit of incredible statism) that on paper sounded great (earning them a lot of admirers), but in reality they were economic and ecological nightmares, built on the backs of a lot of oppressed people.
Regarding slavery - it is remarkable that everyone is looking for "a guy in chains" type scenarios. When the government has absolute control over the population, and dictates exactly what and where and how they'll do things, and the benefit is largely for someone else, that's slavery. You don't need to a white cotton farm owner to have slavery - Communist China practiced it on a very large scale.
The point is that you tried to make...
Errr, no I didn't. In fact I don't believe I mentioned America once, or made reference to it apart from as a part of the whole called "The West". In fact, I'm Canadian.
Sounds like you have an incredibly simplistic and polarized way of seeing the world, where only extreme contrasts and competing factions can exist. How sad.
Was there supposed to be something profound about that, because if there was then you were terribly off the mark. Sometimes the ol' transposition technique works, but here it was just lame.
Please elaborate on these slaves. I know of no huge slave populations in China's history.
When state controls tell you exist what you can do where, to the point that it has absolute control over your life, you're a slave. You exist to serve the communist party.
Also, China's wealth is not simple "slingshotting."
The point was simply that China isn't simply going through what other countries went through earlier now - China has advantages, economic and technological, that obviously the "West" didn't have as it developed. Saying "OMG! China is doing it so much better than England did in the 1800s" just sounds rather...ridiculous.
And China is not "of course" cleaning up. China is pioneering. China is looking forwards 50 years. That is what has kept China chugging and not collapsing.
Um, no - China is "of course" cleaning up. It's basically in the cards for every progressing economy - it reaches a stage and then suddenly environmental concerns come to the forefront. When you have huge centrist control and a docile population, you also have the ability to "pioneer" by pushing people around to do whatever you want. Oooh, win win.
I mean seriously, It really would be. I say this in a good way.
Unfortunately planned cities tend to go terribly wrong. Brasilia is a good example of a planned city, and while it eventually became a credible city, it is in spite of the original planning, not because of it.
China is trying to industrialize and modernize without the same harships and human suffering.
Yeah, China is a real beacon of freedom and fairness. Oh, no, wait - China actually has a long, brutal history of tyranny and oppression, with a history of more "slaves" than the West ever had in its worst moments. Moralizing about that is, quite simply, remarkable.
China's current economic wealth is of course slingshotting on the backs of the West - it hardly occurring in a vacuum.
India is much worse, and per capita Canada is one of the worst with America coming in second.
Canada 1/40th the number of people over more land than China - saying we're "worse" is lame given that the "per capita" consumption is largely the creation of resource wealth for the world.
Of course China is cleaning up, as all economies do when they become more wealthy - suddenly living in a shithole doesn't seem as appealing, and you start to want to have clean air and clean cities. Just look at the industrialization of London, England as a great example of this.
Since filing a patent is evil, Google has violated its "do no evil" policy.
Queue someone claiming that it's a defensive patent, and Google is just using the system to defend themselves. Of course that sort of claim is pure nonsense.
Anyways, it's hardly new - Google has been using the patent system since they first hit the scene with PageRank.
HDTV adoption is slow at best, and consumers aren't going to move to a better format than that for many many decades.
One of the benefits of HDTV, as commonly deployed, is that it decouples the display from the source - e.g. you can watch an 1080i signal on a 480i SDTV screen, a 720p, or a 1080i, or hypothetically anything larger. My LCD TV accepts a DVI input feeding from 480i to 1080i, and it displays it on the 720p screen.
This decoupling is a major benefit, because if one of the satellite providers wanted to support this new hyper-format, they'd likely have a traditional DVI output, along with a new Super-DVI or whatever output.
The huge schism that happened between NTSC and HDTV never needs to happen again, and there is no reason why we can't continually scale up. LCD prices are dropping, and it seems entirely reasonable that large grids of high resolution displays will become economical within a decade.
Of course I'm still wondering how a 8K x 4K camera (32MP) comes out at "8MP".
Thinking about it, I suppose they mean that they matrixed 4 8MP sensors to create one image (just like standard photo-stitching).
Thats all well and good but what kind of display can handle that resolution?
A super matrix of LCD panels. Really with the continuing advances in LCD quality and yields, they're going to continue to get cheaper and cheaper, and there will come a time not too long from now when you can do a Farenheit 451 and have a room with walls that are giant televisions.
Of course I'm still wondering how a 8K x 4K camera (32MP) comes out at "8MP". A quality 32MP camera is still years off.
Clearly I'm talking about different versions beyotch. And yes, you insensitive clod, I am drunk and retarded.
Sorry, only in Opera does it appear paragraphless. Looks fine in Opera and Firefox. I apologize for this interruption.
Someone should enlighten the author of that article about the purpose and use of paragraphs. What a wall of text.
If you havent noticed /. is pretty much under seige by Microsofties and astroturfers. Not many dislike google since they have done nothing wrong yet. Except ofcourse your average MS fanboy who hates everything that MS hates.
Are you kidding? This place is overflowing with Google juice, with endless ranks of Google fanboys falling over themselves to praise whatever it is that Google has done lately to push ads more intrusively into our lives. I find it remarkable that an argument that "all Google wants is to feed you ads" can be stated with a straight face. Isn't this the crowd that demonized Doubleclick to the ends of the Earth? So what makes Google so different from Doubleclick? Oh, right - they use Linux so they must be good.
So keep on believing that whoever isn't drinking the Google coolaid is secretly a Microsoft astroturfer.
But the fact that a company's actions may be motivated by profit does not mean they aren't commendable.
Commendable might be a bit strong of a word. Agreeable perhaps, but not commendable.
For instance in the era of Rosa Parks, most private bus companies fervently disagreed with segregation rules. Champions for the oppressed? No. Most of the owners were terrible racists, but they saw profits hurt by the law. It doesn't make their opposition commendable, it makes it coincidentally parallel with real good.
The use of Iframes is 100% optional.
? The parent poster was giving those two options as alternatives, not as a combination. e.g. if you can't use xmlhttprequest, then you use a hidden iframe to do the background transfers.
With most of the tasks that I've found a use for "AJAX" I've never used XML. Rather, we should just be referring to the general sense of using either XMLHttpRequest/Iframes as "Ajax" to keep things simple for consumers.
Which is why the term is meaningless drivel.
Windows Live is a painfully bad rip off of Google's Personal Homepage [google.com].
I hope you're kidding. It seems, more and more, that there are the deluded who believe that Google, along with Apple, are responsible for everything.
This is nothing more than a rehash of portals, such that we saw in the late 90s. Excite was one of the biggest and most configurable portals, and of course many of us configured it, setting up our stocks and our weather, and then never used it again.
Developers are leaving Microsoft and going to Google in hopes to make millions like early Microsoft employees did.
It's a bit late for that at Google now: It's too big of a company for that get-rich-quick type nonsense. However it is true that a lot of ex-Microsofters have left to join small startups, or to create one themselves. This is especially true too now that Microsoft is becoming just like every other traditional "where careers go to die" organization.
Also Microsoft is stuck using their own software as a development platform
Nonsense. Microsoft's development platform is extraordinarily powerful, and it certainly isn't a detriment that they use it.
The problem that Microsoft's internet ventures have, and it's always been this way, is that they do the absolute minimum amount possible to ensure that they aren't eviscerated, but no more. If you remember, the IE team smoked Netscape, and then they were promptly disbanded. Why? Because that team and group represented a threat to the Microsoft cash cows - Office and Windows. These "web versions" of Office and Windows are almost laughable - if anything they'll complement, and most certainly they won't replace until Microsoft is on its deathbed and the revenue has completely dried up.
But if it were me, and if I play CIO for a moment, I'd make DANG sure I get it right before converting millions of documents.
.pdf in the near-term and see how these openDoc formats shake out.
Remember that Microsoft has made OfficeXML the default file format in the upcoming Office 12, so some sort of shift seems inevitable. That sort of transition was probably taken as an opportunity to consider alternatives, which is how OpenDocument got its big break.
I'd work more towards
PDFs are one of their file formats (in fact it led Microsoft to support PDFs natively in Office), however it's more of an output format rather than a working format.
This line kills me: "OpenDocument file format standard might be influenced by Microsoft." Why?
It's currently reading as - "suggested that groups that oppose the OpenDocument file format standard might be influenced by Microsoft."
Of course the meaning is that some believe that the big backlash recently (with every "grassroots" group announcing their beefs with the move to OpenDocument) is the result of Microsoft lobbying, which isn't an inconceivable idea.
You are wrong to tell us "if you don't like it don't play the game." Blizzard deserves all the bad press it can be given. They're not going to get bad press if everyone just silently submits
If you vote with your dollars then Blizzard will get much worse than bad press - they'll be financially punished. Of course most of the complainers don't want to stop playing, they just want to have thei cake and eat it too.
I've played several games that utilize the highly invasive punkbuster software, and as long as the operations are internal and it isn't sending my data up to headquarters, I don't care what it's doing. The net result is that the online games I play tend to have a vastly higher quality than in days of old, so I'm entirely willing to "Give up the right", as lame as that is.
I still don't get the uproar over the scanning, because it's not like the entire book is made available for free. The search is so crippled that it makes me think the people who are upset have never used it before.
The uproar is because Google is making a giant internal database of copyrighted material - a database that, in some scenarios, could easily be copied (either by an employee, a hacker, whatever). Publishers don't want that sort of central risk, especially when they aren't being brought in as partners (let's face it - Google exists on the backs of everyone else's content)